'But, as Jeremy McCarter writes in a splendid appreciation in the New York Times, 'Grover's Corners is, in retrospect, an unbearable place: quite content to be homogeneous, conformist, anti-intellectual and lacking 'any culture or love of beauty.' When staged properly, the play doesn't let us merely feel simple nostalgia. Wilder did capture the simple goodness and common sense of the Grover's Corners denizens, and audiences responded,' Richman says. Whether audiences plumbed the play's depths, or whether they simply soaked in the nostalgic view of turn-of-the-century American small-town life is another matter.

22, 1938, and ran for nearly 350 performances on Broadway. 'Would her living abilities have been larger had she grown up in a town whose sense of beauty went beyond the occasional hymn and Handel's Largo?'Īlthough an accomplished playwright and novelist, Wilder did not achieve critical recognition as a playwright until the production of 'Our Town,' for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Emily, as she takes her place among the dead, comes to realize how much of life she failed properly to appreciate as her moments rushed rapidly past,' he says. 'The play praises small-town virtues, but it suggests a near-tragic counterpoint.

However, it is hard to know the extent to which Wilder - the most erudite and cosmopolitan of writers - embraces, rather than probes, the simple verities that the denizens of Grover's Corners, most of them Republicans and Protestants, cling to,' Richman says.

'His play sets out to capture and appreciate the small, seemingly insignificant but actually wondrous moments of life, placing them against those immensities of space, time, and eternity. The three-act play is set in a town modeled after several New Hampshire towns in the Monadnock region, including Jaffrey, Peterborough, and Dublin. The play's final tableau, with a grief-stricken George prostrate at the feet of the Emily who is even now moving on beyond him, is as heartbreaking in 2008 as it was when it was first staged in 1938,' says Richman, a professor of theatre and dance. The great ideas and emotions - love, wonder, the response to death - are always with us. Seventy years later, the play by Thornton Wilder set in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover's Corners remains one of the most frequently produced and most beloved plays in American theatrical history.Īccording to theater historian David Richman at the University of New Hampshire, the lasting popularity of 'Our Town' ' a summertime favorite among New England theatre groups ' can be attributed to Wilder's use of minimal scenery and props, the appeal of its ensemble cast and because it deals, at least in part, with nostalgia. Newswise - In January 1938, the play 'Our Town' made its debut in New Jersey.

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